Forgotten Investment In Bitcoin Buys Man A Flat In Central Oslo

In 2009, Kristoffer Koch bought 5,000 bitcoins for £16 and forgot about it

A Norwegian citizen has made the headlines thanks to a small investment in Bitcoin that years later bought him a flat in Oslo.

Kristoffer Koch, a 29 year old engineer, got 150 kroner (£16) worth of bitcoins in 2009, at a time when the virtual currency was trading for pennies. He completely forgot about it until April this year, when he read an article about the soaring value of the virtual currency.

Today, the typical price of one Bitcoin stands at around £132.

Lost wallet

Bitcoins are a digital currency based on an open-source, peer-to-peer Internet protocol, first introduced in 2009 by an anonymous developer known under the alias ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.

It was long thought that bitcoins cannot be traced to establish their ownership, leading to their popularity among certain Internet subcultures. However, several experts have suggested that anonymity of Bitcoin is an illusion, and with some effort, digital wallets can be connected to real individuals.

The NKR reports that Koh invested into the newly created currency while he was writing a university paper on encryption. He completely forgot about this episode until reading about the wild price fluctuations of the Bitcoin market in April. Koch says he spent a day trying to find the password to his Bitcoin wallet, which turned out to be worth around £429,000.

Cashing out just a fifth of this amount allowed the lucky engineer to buy and renovate a flat worth 2.6 million kroner (£116,000) in the wealthy Toyen neighbourhood in Oslo.

“It’s bizarre, these psychological reflexes that make us attach a value to something that doesn’t have any in itself,” said Koh.

Earlier this month, the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply following the closure of illegal ‘Dark Web’ marketplace Silk Road by the FBI, and the seizure of $3.6 million (£2.2m) worth of bitcoins. It has since fully recovered, hitting a new post-crash high last week.

Max 'Beast from the East' Smolaks covers open source, public sector, startups and technology of the future at TechWeekEurope.
If you find him looking lost on the streets of London, feed him coffee and sugar.

At enterprises everywhere, private clouds are catching on. And increasingly, businesses are finding that an open hybrid approach to building private clouds is the best way to maximize their benefits—cost-effective, flexible computing and storage capacity without single-vendor limitations. That conclusion is causing IT leaders to seek out alternative providers of virtualization technology as well as […]

Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year in business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The company’s research philosophy originates with the CEO’s 360-Degree Perspective™, which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research™ methodology. This unique approach enables us to […]

Small and midmarket organizations depend on their data as much as large enterprises depend on theirs—but the right tools for protecting a smaller organization’s data are not enterprise tools with reduced feature sets and price tags. Organizations of all sizes need to understand their exposure caused by mediocre protection, and then utilize “right-sized” technologies that […]

Shifting SMB IT and Storage Requirements This report describes how the HP Simply StoreIT program and HP MSA Storage can help small and midsized businesses (SMBs) reduce costs and improve operations by quickly and easily adding storage that is optimized for server virtualization to their IT infrastructure deployments.